When someone pinged me a link to the piece a week later, I did what I do all the time: read, screenshot and share. If it doesn’t fall foul of local law, is information that appears reliable and may trigger debate, it's fair game.

What followed was a flurry of phone calls and WhatsApp messages. Rather than responsibly engage and attempt to respond to the claims in the piece, I was instead asked to delete the tweet, questioned why I was “bringing it to the ecosystem”, was told it was “net-negative” and would cause “harm to both them (Fetchr) and the wider ecosystem”.

A classic case of shoot the messenger.

When you strike a nerve in the region you get angry phone calls and WhatsApp messages.

We’re the masters of PR puffery but find it near on impossible to talk about the bad and the ugly.

Instead of responding to criticism with nuanced debate, we lash out in haste 😵

Why are we unable to be open and honest with ourselves, our customers, our employees, our investors, and just say it like it is? Own that you screwed something up, apologise profusely and move on. It always plays out better than you'd imagine, and more importantly lets you draw a line in the sand.

A Crypto Exchange Lawyers Up

After writing a piece about the challenges that BitOasis, a pioneering crypto exchange in the Middle East, were having with keeping their banking channels open (who wasn’t), a journalist and their publication found themselves sandbagged with a legal notice claiming defamation and threats to take further action.

When describing the incident to me, the journalist stated in unequivocal terms that they actively reached out to BitOasis seeking comment for a number of weeks. Not having heard back – borderline startup suicide in my book – the piece was written without comment.

On realising that the article didn't play well, subsequent engagement with an evasive email and a legal notice four days later through your high priced lawyers is almost a scene out of HBO's Silicon Valley.

Why would you actively choose not to be part of a story about your business? As a startup founder, if you've got one job, it's the unrelenting telling (and selling) of your story – who better to do that with the men and women who've dedicated their lives to writing them?

On Saturday, I got a strange call saying that the station had to pull the interview. I recall a profuse apology and general confusion over what had happened. It was pretty clear in my mind that someone had called in a favour, but to what end remains a mystery to me to this day.

I reached out a couple of months later on realising that Dubai Eye was running an e-commerce special:

August happened:

September rolled around:

Through summer 2015 and early 2016 I stumbled into a weekly technology contributor slot that took place during Dubai Eye's mid-afternoon show, The Ticket. I'd spend a few hours each week researching what was new in tech, try to relate it to the travel space when I could, and spend a good half hour chatting about it on the radio. With just north of twenty five episodes under my belt, I was totally ready to take on podcasting!

In October, one of the presenters on The Ticket reached out asking whether I'd be up for a one off:

I naturally said yes, given that I had taken the summer off and was more than happy to get back into actually doing things.

Notes done:

An hour before airtime:

A few hours later:

At some point I stopped taking it personally and decided to leave it be. I do however wonder how insecure one must be to silence an entrepreneur from discussing the very business that you acquired from him.

In the region, many of us self-censor and most of us know where to draw the line, but when we decide to use the very same lines to attempt to hide the truth, mute discussion, and squash necessary discourse about the challenges that our businesses face – we not only do ourselves a disservice, but hurt our fragile ecosystem and the kindling opportunities set to play a growing role in the future of our economies.

It’s easy to point a finger at the region's political preference for conformity rather than debate, but the reality is that we're afraid of being judged and the consequences of failure.

The sooner we work up the courage to speak up – we failed, we broke it, the economy is in a recession, we made a mistake, we shouldn't have done it that way – the faster we learn, evolve, and earn the experience required to be able to build globally competitive enterprises.

From Fitness to PaymentsIn July 2017, my younger brother and our COO, Aamir decided to kick off a fitness related startup, which unfortunately didn’t go as planned, but did result in the idea that was to become Lunatap.

Aamir wanted a super easy way to allow a coach or fitness instructor to be able to accept a payment on the go using their iPhone or Android device, whilst using his existing Stripe account. A number of simple solutions to this problem exist on both the App and Play Stores, but we found them to be expensive (in most cases adding 1% or more on top of Stripe’s standard fee structure) and not iterating significantly if at all after launch.

Enter LunatapWe designed and built Lunatap to be a beautifully easy way to take your Stripe account on the road. We like to think that we’re at the beginnings of creating a tiny software based POS machine that’s on your phone rather than being an ugly bit of extra hardware that you need to charge and lug about. Lunatap does multi-currency, accepts input via type or scan, and is competitively priced at 0.1% on top of Stripe’s standard fees.

IterationWe recently added support for Spanish, French and German, making it the first time that we’ve built a product in a set of languages where we have no native speakers on the team (yet!). Definitely an interesting challenge when running QA.

What’s NextWe’ve had a bunch of feedback about adding support to accept card input via NFC, which is likely to become our next big feature. Whilst definitely doable on Android, iOS’s CoreNFC framework currently only supports reading NFC tags in NDEF format which sadly rules out being able to read credit cards for the time being.

We’ve also had feature requests to bring more of Stripe’s native functionality such as pre-authorisations and refunds to Lunatap together with support for card readers and tablets, all of which we’re considering as areas to work on next.

We’re also debating adding support for other payment providers, but we’re big fans of Stripe, so this remains a hotly debated topic internally.

With almost 600 customers connected up and approaching half a million dollars in payment volume processed, we’re excited that about the potential of a small side project turning into an interesting product!

We really appreciate feedback, questions and comments or if you’d like to just get in touch, it’s best to do so via our support form.

After having spent a number of months researching and working on an early product, we have unfortunately decided to park any further development of BitPado, given a myriad of regulatory and banking challenges in a number of the markets that we were looking to target.

From the outset it was clear that we needed to solve for product, regulation, and banking. Whilst no one expected it to be an easy ride, the depth of resistance in cracking through some of the key problems has been far greater than we initially anticipated.

RegulatoryWith India, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Qatar effectively banning the use of virtual currencies in their respective economies, the struggle for legitimacy and acceptance has become an attritional uphill battle.

A notice from HSBC Middle East that went out to its customers in Qatar in late April 2018

BankingIn a post-2008 financial crisis world, banks are increasingly ruled by compliance teams and a complex bevy of regulatory action. As some of our potentialpeershavefound, getting access to and keeping banking relationships up and running is no mean feat.

Our view on solving banking was to leverage a number of long-standing relationships, which manifested themselves in the form of a bank account, but one that came with conditions that made it infeasible for operational use. Casting the net wider brought the realisation that this was a global problem and any potential options were often in the reputationally inappropriate bucket.

An email from popular exchange Bitstamp declining a request to withdraw funds to an ENBD account

If one is able to get access to and maintain a viable banking relationship, an even greater challenge comes knocking in the form of banks recognising crypto venues and actively preventing their customers from transacting with said venues. This propels the banking challenge to a level that is near unsolvable without appropriate regulatory support.

It’s challenging enough building a new business. Doing it without access to the banking system eventually leads to the logical conclusion that there are far easier (and perhaps more fun) ways to earn a living.

Hindsight is 20/20Crypto is at a cross roads. Followers of the space broadly fall into two polarising camps, those who believe that the space will transform financial services and markets as we know them, and those who think this has been one of the greatest asset bubbles in the history of humanity and a space that one should avoid at all cost. I suspect that the true impact will be somewhere in the middle — crypto is likely to have a longer term effect on some asset classes and markets, but is highly unlikely to replace one of the fundamental reasons for being of sovereign nations — the ability to issue currency — one protected since the beginning of time by weapons, armies and war.

We’re happy to be proven wrong.

Proposed user authentication flow for BitPado

As a team, we started off as skeptics, became enthralled and enamoured by the allure of a solution proposing native value transfer on the Internet, only to return to a state of disillusionment a few months later. In hindsight, we should have spent significantly more time thinking deeply about the space before making a new product announcement.

Whilst we sincerely appreciate the support of the almost two thousand individuals that signed up to our mailing list — before we pulled the plug on it in late April, we’re going to sit this one out. We continue to keep half an eye on development in the space, but we’re formally moving back over to consumer tech and its ilk 🚀

With the post-acquisition drama of noon finally in our rear view mirror, it feels like it’s time to reflect briefly and outline what we’re doing next.

I always felt that JadoPado had a shot at relevancy on the back of the product and the experience that we attempted to build alongside it. It didn’t matter that we were under resourced or outgunned when it came to capital, we figured that we would eventually make it happen. Through sheer persistence of will if not anything else.

Then the big shift happened.

The make up of the e-commerce landscape in the region fundamentally shifted over the course of the summer of 2016. Rumours started to swirl that Alibaba, Rakuten and Amazon were taking a serious look at Souq, whilst evidence started to mount that noon was in the works with funding amounting to $1 billion being available from Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund as well as the Abu Dhabi government.

As we left summer behind it became clear that we had to take a strategic call on our business. Either go out and raise the capital required ($50m or more) or find a home where we could leverage the competencies that we’d built. Given the challenging fundraising environment in the region — whilst change is afoot our ecosystem remains woefully undercapitalised — it was clear that the latter option was the only realistic one.

We ramped up outreach and over the next few months found ourselves speaking with anyone who we thought may be a good fit and in a number of cases, senior figures in retail, many of whom who shared their last name with that of their business. Whilst progress is never as fast as you’d like it to be, we eventually whittled it down to a short list that had expressed interest, some in retail, some in the broader tech space and others looking to build out pure play e-commerce.

There’s been a range of speculation around the actual transaction. Some insist that we were acquihired whilst others speculate that the number was in the significant millions. Frankly, it was neither. There was a fair amount of money, but more importantly there was a great outcome for the team and the product that we built.

Deciding to exit, no matter the circumstances is always a tough decision. Occasionally when I find myself automagically typing “@jadopado.com”, I feel a twinge of nostalgia, but mostly I feel relief that we survived the first experiment and lived to kick off the next one.

Esanjo originates from combining the “e” from electronic and “asanjo” which is a Memon (a small globally dispersed community originating from the state of Gujarat, India) word that means “ours”, to become “electronically ours” which in our eyes is everything that the Internet brought to the world — an open, permission-less, collective ownership of the future.

Our initial idea was to build a real estate asset management business on the Ethereum blockchain. If you’ve not come across them, REITs are a listed equity like vehicle that enable easier real estate ownership, but are inefficient to put together in terms of required asset size, listing requirements as well as cost. We figured that unbundling REITs onto a blockchain — ideally one that already had liquidity could be an idea that had legs.

After spending a number of months together with our engineering team exploring today’s blockchain space, it feels like our timing is off. Whilst blockchains remain a fundamentally interesting piece of technology, the rapid iteration — whilst inherently a good thing, makes it difficult to build a stable product. Hard forks don’t got hand in hand with the backward compatible stability that some businesses require. Add that everyone and their dog is seemingly doing a blockchain project, the level of noise and proliferation of projects that don’t actually need a blockchain is drowning out legitimate plays.

We’re keeping a keen eye on how Ethereum and related blockchain projects evolve, but for now we’re parking this idea.

Our iterated approach is to create, build and invest in interesting technology businesses.

CreatingWe’re kicking around some ideas in payments, classifieds, fitness and food. These are broadly new from-scratch opportunities where we own both the product and experience.

Earlier this summer Aamir Kassim and Rohan Date co-founded SudorFit, an idea that we’re incubating within Esanjo. It’s evolved from personal training to offering boxing and mixed martial arts sessions at local schools with an ongoing debate about wading into the corporate market. Whilst far removed from tech, we’re exploring interesting consumer categories where we think technology could play a greater role in creating new and enhancing existing lines of business. Fitness Tech is definitely one of those spaces.

BuildingWe’re also getting involved in building interesting product for others. Some of our early projects include:

A multi platform mobile e-commerce offering for the largest mid-market franchise fashion retailer in the region

An e-commerce play for one of the largest tyre distributors in the United Arab Emirates. An incredibly interesting space

Advisory, leadership and product management for a new line of business at the fastest growing ride hailing startup in the region

InvestingWe’ve made a small investment in an interesting blockchain startup called Verify and are looking at a handful of other opportunities.

We’re definitely not a VC building a portfolio, nor are we a seed stage spray and pray. If anything we’re fairly cautious investors and over the years we’ve found that it’s relatively rare for us to find the magical combination of right team, idea and market. We’re also conscious of ensuring that our approach is Sharia compliant and therefore turn down opportunities in some sectors.

Our ideal today is to find simple internet businesses ($3m to $30m in revenues) that have high margins, are profitable or are fast approaching that point, are growing steadily and are run by a great team. We’ve taken a leaf from and love Tiny’s philosophy and approach, but we’re not ready to buy businesses outright just yet.

As with most things that we do, our approach is iterative, always evolving and with many an experiment throw in for good measure.

Our vision for Esanjo is to build an interesting, steady growth, profitable, technology business. We want to be a great place to do interesting work with incredible people, off the wall ideas and plenty of room for experimentation. We have no interest in taking on funding nor turning into the next unicorn.

It isn't every day that a $1 billion dollar startup launches in the Middle East, let alone in the e-commerce space. Following on from my post in September 2016 I've been keeping an eye on noon's domain and infrastructure to see what pops up.

I've been putting this post off for a while as my initial idea was to dive as deeply as I could into noon's stack by looking at what was sitting at various levels from DNS downwards. However, noon's beta recently popped up publicly for a short while, giving me an opportunity to poke around and take an early look at their upcoming product.

Here's what I've seen so far:

Homepage

You land on a responsive page where a large hero banner greets you. Up top you'll find from left to right a toggle for Arabic, a magnifying glass icon to access search, which is popped open by default. If you're signed in, the default help text in the search bar will greet you with your name and the time of day. A nice touch.

The top navigation bar continues with the noon logo which always brings you back home, followed by a very prominent Track Order button.

Clicking on the button results in an on-screen overlay that provides a view of upcoming shipments. Given the prominence of the button and the fact that it results in a pop up rather than taking you to another page, suggests that noon is working on some form of speedy delivery with (live?) tracking built in.

Next along is a Chat button, which isn't functional at this time. Taken together with Track Order, it feels like noon has squarely set its sights on an immediate, highly responsive, real-time like experience.

The top navigation ends with an icon representing a person which takes you to your account followed by a cart icon, which takes you to your cart!

Below the top navigation is a slim black navigation bar with links to top categories. This is visible on initial load, but disappears as your scroll. The top navigation bar retains a permanently fixed position.

The rest of the homepage is broken into a variety of banners and sections such as best sellers. Standard fare for an e-commerce offering.

Wrapping up the home page we arrive at the footer, which is double height and is split into a black area highlighting key categories with icons, whilst a call to action takes you to an all categories page that I wasn't able to access. The second half of the footer is a shade of dark grey and includes two lists of categories, a set of links to other areas of the noon site as well as the usual social icons, app icons and contact information.

Categories

Category landing pages differ in terms of layout based on which category you've selected.

The Electronics category landing page has a row of rotating subcategory banners followed by an area that highlights specific individual products.

As you scroll further, the page gets a little bit more interesting with a mixture of text links highlighting products within a subcategory, a section for best sellers and more text links leading off to other subcategories.

The Health and Beauty category has a slightly different layout, including a set of narrow banners and accompanying text leading off to subcategories, a list of best sellers, followed by a hero banner image.

It is natural for primary category landing page to vary a fair amount, as they will tend to get traffic from SEO, PPC as well as direct, making them key merchandising opportunities. Over time, they'll turn into real estate that brands and sellers will be willing to pay for.

Product

noon's product page compromises of a large hero image, a product information box that includes a product title, price, a quantity drop down and two call to actions. It is notable that the Buy now button is yellow and is highly visible whilst the Add to Cart button is white and blends into the page. This again points to noon's experience being built around immediacy versus your typical e-commerce experience. The Buy now button wasn't functional, but the Add to Cart button added a single quantity to my cart.

The other bit to note here is the text that states "Sold and Fulfilled by noon". My understanding is that noon will procure inventory as well as take it on consignment from those who are willing to give it to them. Suppliers have been asked to ship inventory to noon's warehouse, from where all fulfilment will take place.

The rest of the content on the product page compromises of a description, which at a quick glance looks like it is brand, manufacturer or publisher copy. Some products include technical details, with attributes varying by category. A couple of widgets that provide bundling opportunities and display related products were also visible.

Sign Up and Account

Sign up can take place via a mobile number, email address or the usual triumvirate of Google, Facebook and Twitter. I was able to sign in with the same credentials that I use with a test seller account.

noon's account area is broken up into Orders, Returns & Exchanges (sic), Address book, My Wallet and My Profile. Each area has default landing text and appropriate call to actions if no data is available yet.

It is very encouraging to see that returns handling has been thought through and has an area dedicated to it. Unfortunately this has tended to be a bit of an after thought in the region.

I'm not sure who this handsome Emirati man is, but I assume that he'll be replaced with your own image if you sign up or sign in with a social service that provides access to a profile image. The Address Book page is the most colourful that I came across and matches noon's pre-launch landing page. It's an interesting detail that the Emirates Airline graphic has been carried over.

The last area of interest is My Wallet, which provides transaction history as well as a way to manage your saved cards. I tested this using test card numbers from CyberSource and added a Visa as well as an Amex card. This seems to confirm the rumour that noonPay will initially be a wrapper on top of CyberSource, but I've been told that these card numbers work with other payments gateways as well.

Cart and Checkout

Hitting the cart icon in the top navigation bar took me to a cart page, summarising my order and giving me two call to actions, one which allows you to continue shopping and the other which takes you to checkout. The payment icons on the page notably don't include an icon for Cash on Delivery.

A line of text notes that delivery starts at AED 14. Assuming that this number is not a filler value, it lines up with local delivery costs in Dubai and if anything is a touch cheaper than other carriers.

I incremented the number of items that I had in my cart and managed to rapidly increase the item count as well as the corresponding AED value. It did not feel like this was connected to noon's ERP system as I went well beyond a reasonable in-stock count for the SKU I tested with.

Hitting the Checkout button, I moved to the first step of checkout. noon's checkout is not enclosed, which is a know industry best practice to remove unnecessary elements to minimise distraction and help customers journey efficiently through the purchase funnel. The top navigation bar remain visible and allows navigation elsewhere using any of its icons.

The delivery method is titled "Personal delivery" with what looks like a noon truck icon perhaps indicating that noon may have its own fleet up and running at launch. The delivery cost stated an overly reasonable AED 15 with a bunch of items in my cart, making me question if an actual calculation was yet to take place.

I hit the "Add or change" link which took me to a select your address screen, where I hit the Add new address button.

I arrived at what for all intents looks like a search bar. I typed in city names, country names and all sorts of other things before trying the Done button, which eventually took me to a standard address form.

I was able to fill out every value on the form save for the Country and City field which would always take me back to the search bar. It took me a while and a look at developer tools to figure out why this was taking place. While it wasn't loading up, this particular page was attempting to load Google Maps and assumedly use the search bar to narrow the viewable area to one that was more relevant.

A Google Maps API key (hopefully one that isn't going to create a security incident) is visible as is a set of latitude and longitude GPS coordinates. The two in my screenshot point at the first interchange on Sheikh Zayed Road, which is where Google Maps places its Dubai label. Centring the map at this point may indicate noon's use of geo IP information to get a broad city location.

The use of Google Maps to capture GPS coordinates again points to noon's intent to build an experience around immediacy.

As I was unable to manually fill out the Country or City field, this prevented me from unfortunately getting any further in the checkout process.

Terms of Sale

noon's Terms of Sale is a long document, so I won't go into all of it. It does however make for interesting reading and provides more insight into their business model.

2.3 states that they only accept Visa and MasterCard versus the Amex logo on the cart page together with being able to add an Amex test card to my account. It does however confirm that Cash on Delivery will be available.

The final bit of 2.7 c) is interesting in that it states "collect from us". I wonder if this indicates that pick up points or the ability to pick up directly from retailers is in the works for the near future.

3.4 indicates that noon may work with suppliers that aren't located locally potentially moving away from a fully stocked model in the future. This makes sense given the sheer size of the catalogue that they're aiming to carry. At some point, it won't be commercially viable to carry every single SKU in stock (whether you own it or not), as the depth of demand will not match markets such as the US. Also the Pareto principle applies.

4.1 states that noon will offer a thirty (30) day return policy on almost every category, save those where a longer return policy may apply.

4.8 indicates that noon will not cover the cost of outbound shipping when a refund is calculated, but will cover the cost of return shipping in some cases.

4.10 states that a re-stocking fee of up to 30% will apply on certain product categories, if a return doesn't meet the conditions stated in 4.5 or if the return is outside the return window, opening up the possibility of returns beyond the thirty day window.

Clause 5 states that noon will provide a warranty on a number of different product categories. This indicates a willingness to source product flexibly (read: grey market), allowing pricing power versus the desire of principals and distributors to maintain price parity across channels.

Notes

A few thoughts and observations to wrap:

1. Chat & Scalability

I didn't spot a contact form or an email address through which I could reach noon's support team. This indicates that chat will be the primary support mechanism. While it allows support to be very responsive, chat doesn't scale as efficiently as email and if anything is very akin to offering phone support. Conversations take longer to get to the point, taking up more time than they should, whilst support teams tend not to be as good juggling multiple chat conversations as they are at dealing with multiple email cases.

Keep the customer waiting in a chat conversation and the support experience declines rapidly in minutes versus respond to a customer's email within a couple of hours and you'll get a pat on the back for being incredibly responsive.

2. Thirty Day Return Policy

Incredibly positive for potential customers but I'd question the commercial feasibility especially for categories such as Electronics.

3. Mapping in Checkout

I can understand the use of mapping on mobile devices where a GPS sensor is readily available to provide accurate location data (if permissions allow one to do so), but getting location data is significantly harder on tablet and desktop devices very few of which have access to a GPS sensor, forcing the user to manually input their location. Not an easy ask.

4. I tried noon's 800 number, but it didn't ring.

5. I didn't see any options for other currencies or the ability to toggle to other countries. What I've seen so far feels very UAE specific and I wonder if and how customers in Saudi Arabia will be served at launch.

Following on from my last update on noon and all the drama that came after, someone likely in error, dropped me a line with what looks to be noon's latest and possibly final seller pitch deck before they go live.

The deck goes into a fair amount of depth versus material seen previously and makes for interesting reading for anyone in or considering entering the region's e-commerce space.

As an aside, I found a couple of the slides to be curiously similar to some of my prior work at JadoPado.

If rumour and Reddit be true, noon is set to go live on the 15th of August 2017.

This post originally appeared on the JadoPado Blog and has been re-produced here to preserve the JadoPado historical record.

Dear JadoPadoers,

Our grand experiment is at an end after 2420 days.

We’re incredibly happy to announce that JadoPado has been acquired by a large regional business. While we’d love to give you more details, we’ve been sworn to secrecy.

The JadoPado team will be moving into executing great new work, and this unfortunately means that we’ll be closing down the JadoPado marketplace as well as JadoPado hotcake.

If you’ve experienced JadoPado as a customer, thank you for gracing us with your business, for taking a chance on us when others wouldn’t, for speaking with us, for giving us feedback, for all your tweets, for your emails and for generally bearing with us.

If you’re a seller on the JadoPado marketplace, thank you for allowing us to be of service, for trusting us with your business, and for pushing us to keep building. Your access to JadoPado hotcake will remain available until Thursday May 25th 2017. If you may have payments that are due to you, please request a payout and rest assured that your funds will be remitted to you. If you are currently on a plan, your subscription will be cancelled over the next couple of days and any balance for the period left over will be refunded to you.

To my team, my colleagues, my friends, it’s been an honour. I look forward to doing more incredible work with all of you in the near future.

This post originally appeared on the JadoPado Blog and has been re-produced here to preserve the JadoPado historical record.

We’re incredibly excited to announce that we have raised $1 billion from cornerstone investors in the region, including a who’s who of sovereign wealth funds to build the world’s newest largest mall. Located next to Dubai’s imminent Expo 2020 site, the JadoPado Mall will be home to revolutionary new features that will transform the world’s shopping experience.

“This move is crucial in our long-term growth strategy and outflanks a well-known mall operator's attempts to buy our closest competitor”, says Omar Kassim, founder and CEO of JadoPado. “We are taking the next quantum leap by making JadoPado Mall the world's newest largest mall”.

With a structure spanning over 26 million square feet, the mall will house over 4750 stores featuring some of the biggest and best brands across the globe. Visitors will enjoy unparalleled dining options, including exclusive gourmet food experiences, multiple multi-storey food courts and the world’s largest food truck park.

The JadoPado Mall is a revolutionary idea that will for the very first time truly mesh digital and physical in a triumphant coming together of e-commerce and traditional shopping experiences. “We’re conceptualising and building new technology including an exclusive RCFC (really close field communication) app that will provide shoppers with access, seamless browsing and a stunning payments experience at the JadoPado Mall”, said Mr Kassim. “In our beta, the mall will be accessible only to Apple iPhone and Apple Watch users with Android and Android Wear access rolling out in the near future”.

The JadoPado Mall will be a visa-free, free zone, and will be integrated into the world’s soon-to-be largest airport, Al Maktoum International Airport, to provide travellers direct access to the mall without the need to enter the city of Dubai. With key learnings from the aviation industry, JadoPado is also developing the world’s first conveyor system to pioneer the concept of store to boot. “We’re really excited about this”, commented Mr Kassim. “No more bags or inexcusably designed shopping trolleys. Your purchases will go from store straight to your boot. The exemplary baggage handling and sorting systems at Dubai Airports have been a major influence in our strategy”.

In keeping with the luxury shopping sector of the Middle East, the JadoPado Mall’s VVVIP service has partnered with a leading electric automotive manufacturer to offer shoppers a fully integrated self-driving, driver-less experience to the mall and back. “Forget the traditional taxi-rank. Our autonomous fleet of self-driving cars will change how you shop, travel and dine in the near future”, stated Mr. Kassim.

The JadoPado Mall is coming soon, and is expected to launch on time in January 2020.

On the 14th of March 2017, a Souq.com subsidiary, Q Tech General Trading LLC's trade license looked like this:

A day later an action took place to remove the Emirati individual who owns 51% of the business and replace him with Links Regional Commercial Brokers LLC.

Similar actions have taken place for a number of Souq's other subsidiaries, including Q Express and Helpbit:

Helpbit

Q Express

To an observer who has been through a fundraising exercise, it is pretty clear that multiple changes in quick succession to the underlying corporate structure of an organisation are indicative that a clean up process is taking place to close out conditions precedent, or CPs in industry parlance. Essentially, events that need to take place before a transaction can close.

The Links Group are a well known corporate service provider who provide nominee ownership structures to entities that need stability and continuity in an operating environment that demands that a local partner own a simple majority of any onshore, non-freezone operating business.

It is common practice for trade licenses to be set up with informal or loosely formal contracts together with an Emirati individual who consents to act as the local partner for a fixed fee and no other rights. However, regardless of the existence of side agreements (which are very unlikely to hold up in court), the local partner has the same rights over a business as any other shareholder would, including the proceeds of a sale, dividends and other forms of payout.

When a transaction takes place, it is equally common for these arrangements to be thoroughly scrutinised and then amended in order to provide assurance and comfort to a potential buyer that the deal their signing is watertight, will protect their economic rights and will not result in future legal actions demanding damages or payouts.

If Souq were being taken over by Emirati or GCC based shareholders, a corporate nominee owner would not be required and the equity of any subsidiary could be owned outright by a parent entity who would de facto be considered to be Emirati or from the GCC. Whilst unlikely, the Emirati or GCC shareholders could alternatively assume direct control over each subsidiary and not need nor incur the cost of a corporate nominee.

For example, take a look at one of Emaar's subsidiaries, Emaar Technologies LLC:

The entity is owned 99% by Emaar Dubai LLC and 1% by Emaar Properties LLC. You can continue to trace this structure upwards until you get to Emaar Properties PJSC, which is Emaar's primary entity listed on the Dubai Financial Market (DFM).

The entity is owned 99% by Majid Al Futtaim Holding LLC and 1% by Majid Al Futtaim Ventures LLC. Again, you can continue to trace this structure upwards until you get to a set of shareholders.

The logical conclusion is that Amazon (or a non-UAE or GCC entity, if you remain sceptical) has taken over Souq and the transaction is in its final stages of closing, regardless of any last ditch attempts.

P.S. The transaction, widely estimated to be in the $650 million range is equivalent to 0.16% of Amazon's market cap today. It is arguable that there isn't a need for for Amazon to publicly announce that a transaction has taken place, as the size won't have a material affect on their share price. Let that sink in for a bit. The largest technology exit in the region will barely register a blip globally. We've got a long long way to go.

Cloudflare explains that “our edge servers were running past the end of a buffer and returning memory that contained private information such as HTTP cookies, authentication tokens, HTTP POST bodies, and other sensitive data. And some of that data had been cached by search engines.”

Cloudflare’s initial mitigation took 47 minutes, and a global fix was in place in under 7 hours whilst they continued to work with Google and other search engines to remove any cached HTTP responses.

Based on information that we’ve received from Cloudflare, we have not been affected, but as a precaution, we responded swiftly on the 24th of February, by invalidating all user sessions, cookies and authentication tokens including API keys. At this time, we do not believe that forcing a reset of user credentials is necessary.

Additional measures that you can take

We strongly encourage that all users reset their passwords across all services affected by Cloudbleed, and continue to advocate that absolutely everyone should use a password manager.

This post originally appeared on the JadoPado Blog, written by our colleague Sidra Tariq, and has been re-produced here to preserve the JadoPado historical record.

Over the past few months, we’ve been super busy trying to build incredible buyer and seller experiences. Across the board, our teams have been working long days and many nights to ship new product ideas to enhance your experience from the millisecond you load up the JadoPado platform, through to the instantly gratifying moment you use the product that you’ve purchased.

We’re super excited to announce a bunch of things that we’ve rolled out recently:

JadoPado Joy

One of our major goals is to make sure that every purchase begins and ends with delight, fueling our decision to launch our buyer protection programme. Lovingly coined JadoPado Joy, the programme provides the security and confidence that you need when you shop online.

Every product on JadoPado is protected with our promise of 100% of your money back, should you face a genuine problem and aren’t able to resolve your issue with the seller. Whether the seller fails to deliver your order or the product you receive doesn’t function the way the manufacturer intended, the programme ensures that you receive the correct product or get a full refund. It also protects you in case you receive the wrong product or if it doesn’t match the seller’s description.

JadoPado Joy ties tightly into our Case Resolution System.Open a case against the seller to attempt to directly resolve the issue and if you aren’t able to reach a satisfying conclusion, escalate the case to a dispute and allow us to step in, assess the situation and issue a balanced decision. Learn more about how JadoPado Joy protects you.

Seller Performance

If you’re a regular at JadoPado (46% of you repeat each month!), you may have noticed the new Super Store and Trusted Store badges appearing next to seller names on product and store pages. We’ve added these to help you identify great sellers as part of our new Seller Performance programme.

Seller Performance has been designed and built to create exceptional buying experiences by encouraging sellers to deliver consistently high levels of service when fulfilling orders and engaging with buyers. The programme evaluates performance to ensure that sellers deliver orders on time, respond to buyers quickly, improve their buyer feedback rating, don’t cancel or refuse any orders and work diligently to resolve any cases before they’re escalated. A seller’s Performance Score is the accumulation of points across the different metrics.

The Super Store badge is awarded as a symbol of excellence and reliability to sellers that consistently provide outstanding service and maintain a Performance Score of 90 points or above. The Trusted Store badge is awarded to sellers that maintain a score between 60 to 89 points as a reflection of their great service and credibility. The two badges will help guide you towards sellers that’ll deliver consistently exceptional experiences when you purchase next.

Re-committing to our belief that great service builds great businesses, an important component of Seller Performance is to recognise and reward great sellers. Aside from the awesome badge, Super Stores enjoy a 25% reduction in commissions, more exposure across the platform and four free payouts every month. If a seller isn’t quite there in terms of performance, we give them time to course-correct, improve their performance and climb the ladder towards greatness.

We’ve also added a dynamic dashboard to Seller Tools where sellers can monitor their performance and identify areas for improvement. Here’s what it looks like:

Mobile App for Buyers

We launched our beautifully-designed (if we may say so ourselves!) mobile app. Yes, we’ve been a bit behind the curve (it was a resources and focus thing!), but we’re finally here. With an easy-on-the-eyes interface, customisable search and a seamless checkout process, you can go from browsing to checked out in seconds, with a few joyful taps on your screen.

With multiple rounds of testing on different platforms and devices as well as both encouraging and bone-crunching feedback from the team, we pushed out a public beta to the JadoPado community. It was a tremendously helpful process, with detailed feedback allowing us to squash pesky bugs, and tweak both UI and functionality. A few weeks later we released the app in all its glory and continue to improve and add to its feature set.

These are some of the improvements that we rolled out last week:

We improved search by adding recommendations, popular products as well as previous searches to allow you to effortlessly browse through over 5900 categories and daily deals!

On iOS, we enabled iOS Spotlight Search integration. You’ll now see search history right inside iOS search so that you don’t miss out on great deals.

We added dedicated areas for JP’s Deals, New Arrivals and Best Sellers, to enable better and more discovery. Dig deeper into each section to explore more trending products and deals.

We’re seeing super-promising early install numbers and in the 41 days since launch, the app is driving 34.83% of our daily sales, as averaged over the last seven days. We’re hoping that more buyers will enjoy some of the incredible tools that we’re building.

Here’s a look at the app:

But you really should go download it here: Android or iOS. Did we mention that we’re currently doing 10% off on your first order from the app? Go. Now.

JadoPado in Arabic Beta

Many ages ago we had what wasn’t a very well-put-together version of JadoPado in Arabic. We eventually laid it to rest, vowing that we’d come back bigger and better — and here it is! We are incredibly thrilled to announce that we went from hiring Naila to lead our localisation team to launching our Arabic beta in 99 days. Seriously.

While localisation remains a work in progress, we’re at a place where you can smoothly go from browsing, searching and mulling over, through to checkout, completely in Arabic. Friends in Saudi, Egypt and the rest of the GCC, we’ve got you covered!

We have a (very) long road to travel to offer a fully localised Arabic experience. Back in the good ol’ days of JadoPado Direct, we sold 8000+ unique SKUs, while today we list 344,921 SKUs, in a catalogue that continues to grow at an exceptional rate. We face the somewhat unenviable task of localising millions of words, together with marketing collateral as well as other content properties. However, we thrive on challenges and enabling buyers to go from browsing to checkout in their preferred language is something we want to get right.

We’re growing our team by hiring localisation specialists to passionately drive this project forward. Sign up! It should be even more fun when we bring on more regional languages in the near future!

We’re seeing strong uptake in buyers using the Arabic beta for their purchases and expect it to become a mainstay of our product in the near future. Here’s what the Arabic beta looks like today:

We have a bucket load of new features, enhancements and tweaks in our product and engineering pipelines that we’re incredibly excited about. Onwards towards delivering more incredible experiences!

This post originally appeared on the JadoPado Blog on the 12th of October 2016. It has been re-produced here to preserve the JadoPado historical record.

In October 2015 we closed our first external funding, raising $4 million in a round led by BECO Capital, a fast growing VC firm based out of Dubai. As the t’s were crossed and the i’s were dotted, Aamir and I started mulling over what the future JadoPado would look like. What sort of organisation were we building? How could we instil the values that were important to us, while evolving and dissipating our culture as we grew into a larger and more diverse team?

Aamir, our VP of People Operations, had already started work on defining the values that we implicitly shared into a base from which to build. Rather than creating them in a vacuum or paying them the unfortunately typical lip service, he sent out an email (we don’t do internal email, making this a pretty big deal) to the rest of our team and simply asked what they thought our most important values were and used their responses to create a long list. These were then carefully distilled down to 13 values that capture the essence of JadoPado.

While seen as cliched, taking the time to define and express who you are, what you’re doing and where you’re going is an important foundational building block for your organisation. From who you hire to what you end up building can and should boil back down towards whether you’re fulfilling what you set out to do. When you find yourself going off track, your values should guide you back in the right direction.

Designing Organisation Policies

As we began to think more about the organisational policies that were loosely in place, but were poorly defined, we realised that most organisations build policies for what we call “the 2%”, those individuals who have a tendency towards disruption and therefore need rules to govern their organisational behaviour. Unfortunately this leads to long documents that no one reads (until there’s a problem) and a complicated set of policies that the other 98% have to live by. More rules isn’t the right solution.

One of the issues that we came across very consistently was the confusion around leave. How much leave had one taken, how much they had left, what type of leave were they eligible for and the list goes on. It was complicated and messy. Long being admirers of Netflix’s incredible people management framework, we knew in our hearts that we would collectively be doing ourselves injustice if we didn’t at least attempt to live by a set of simple common sense rules that worked for the 98%, rather than the 2%. And thus was born unlimited leave.

After much discussion and debate, this is our current leave policy:

“We have an unlimited leave policy. Take as many days off as you want.”

That’s it.

We’re typically met with skepticism and then incredulity, before the realisation that we’re not trying to pull one over them. The top two questions are usually a variation of: “Surely this can’t work?” closely followed by “What if it’s abused?” The response tends to be pretty simple. Firstly, make sure that your team and whoever is managing you is ok with you going on leave. Unlimited leave doesn’t mean that you go on leave whenever you fancy. Secondly, if someone were to abuse the policy, with the reasonable assumption that we had the right individuals in the organisation, they would be pushed out as they’d have a net negative effect on team and organisational performance.

Six months later, unlimited leave is ticking along and has given everyone one less thing to think about. We strongly encourage taking time off to travel, learn, discover and unwind before returning for the next big push.

Flexible and Remote

We tackled when and where you work, next.

Many jobs do not need to happen between 0900 and 1800, and can actually happen at anytime, as long as tools are available to allow teams to work asynchronously. Slack, an incredibly strong chat-based collaboration tool and Trello, a task management platform, are two without which we would not be able to run JadoPado the way we do today.

Our VP of Engineering, Jobin is incredibly productive between 0000 and 0300. Asking him to come into the office at 0900 just because everyone else does so (a hangover from the industrial age), doesn’t feel right. This led to the logical conclusion that we should allow anyone who wanted to, to work the hours they wanted, with some overlap availability to allow for collaboration, whilst recognising that our approach needed to shift towards being able to measure outcomes rather than hours worked.

Occasionally, Aamir and I amuse ourselves thinking through what a truly remote organisation would look like. Could we, no, dare we operate without a physical presence anywhere? While building a remote organisation from the ground up has its challenges, evolving an existing organisation to go remote is significantly harder.

During Ramadan earlier this summer, we pushed (read: forced) the JadoPado team based in Dubai to not come into JadoPado HQ. Given our existing experiences working with the other half of our team who are based in Colombo, we roughly knew that we had the right tools and a good approach to being able to quickly evolve our processes. While the first few days of #RamadanRemote went well, by the first Wednesday, save for one person, everyone else was back in the office. By the end of week two, I threw in the towel and decided that we were done — for now. Perhaps it was a Dubai summer thing.

We’ve not written off working remotely and instead moved back to what was previously working well. This allows whoever needs to, to work remotely when the need arises, while strongly encouraging them to come in and use the resources that are at their disposal in our physical environments, but more importantly spend quality time with their colleagues, face to face.

Today, being able to work remotely at JadoPado is an earned privilege rather than an absolute right. This feels like a good way to dip our collective toes in the water while we get comfortable with making the shift towards not all being together in a physical space.

This is a short research note pulling information together from various sources. Where possible information has been cross checked with an independent second source or is based on evidence.

Synopsis

It is expected that Alabbar will launch Noon.com (aka Project Next), a marketplace style, fulfilment driven fashion focused e-commerce play on the 11th of November 2016 (Single's Day in China) in early January 2017.

Noon is a beautiful palindromic name that is the vocalisation of the letter "n" in Arabic.

Other business models in the works include a payment gateway product, an events ticketing platform and a travel play.

Alabbar Enterprises has expressed interest to build, acquire and invest in existing players. A number of conversations have taken place from an exploratory perspective but the trigger is yet to be pulled on a significant investment in the region.

Key Events

On the 4th of June 2016, Mohammed Alabbar delivered a keynote speech titled "The Arab Digital Transformation" at the Ramadan Majlis of Sheikh Mohammed Bin Zayed, the Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi. The presentation in Arabic is available on YouTube and provides important context for the play at hand.

c. Alabo Technologies Private Limited India, CIN U74900DL2016FTC291922 (RoC Delhi), formed on 1st March 2016. Directors are Sanjay Bhasin and Fodhil Benturquia. Company is a subsidiary of a foreign company.

e. Project Next is also using Square-8, an architecture and design firm located in Building Three, Emaar Square for organisational administrative support.

f. Noon Holdings AD Ltd, was setup at the beginning of May 2016 in the DIFC as a non-regulated entity.

g. A new set of operating entities that reflect the Noon name were setup at the end of August 2016. These include Noon Management Services, Noon Payments, Noon Express, Noon E Commerce and Noon Warehousing.

Funding

Reports indicate that at least $1bn in funding is available to the venture. $500m from the Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia, available in tranches as well as $500m from Abu Dhabi, assumedly on similar terms.

Business Models

E-commerce Marketplace + Fulfilment

Payment Gateway

Events Ticketing

Travel

Engineering Stack

Scala, dotNet

Hiring

Hiring has taken place across the board from major regional Internet players such as Souq, Namshi and others. Entering into the hiring process is subject to signing an NDA upfront with key hires citing "Stealth Startup" as their new employer.

Reported offers have generally been well above market compensation ranging from 45% to 2x over current pay with additional bonuses.

Fulfilment Fees

Storage Fees

Fees are subject to change, but have been indicated to be 90% accurate.

Fulfilment Centre

A large distribution and fulfilment centre will be based in Dubai South. Capacity is expressed to be multiples of the largest player in the region, but it is not clear to what extent. A vendor reports that they've been requested to supply racking that is similar to an existing large e-commerce retailer's environment but have also been asked to provide palletised racks which indicates that bulk pallet storage will also take place.

It is expected that fulfilment services will be provided to third parties, potentially indicating that Noon.com may manage and fulfil for a given brand's other channels. Zara has been indicated as a potential customer.

Seller Dashboard

Sellers are expected to have a dashboard available in the next couple of weeks.

Categories

It is expected that Noon.com will focus on branded fashion including luxury names such as Gucci and Chanel, whilst other categories will be built alongside.

Noon Pay

An industry insider speculated that Noon Pay may look to position as a PayPal style wallet where the Noon.com marketplace is a key channel for user acquisition and the capture of payment details. The captive details would be subsequently used to sell through other services.

Onwards

I'm nothing but excited for what all of this means for the region. E-commerce and by extension digital is finally getting a fair shake. While no-one with any sort of commercial interest in the space would applaud the rise of competition, it is clear that this will grow the region's digital infrastructure in leaps and bounds, hopefully marking a milestone for a lot more to come.

Updates

September 27th 2016: I was wrong about Amira Rashad, who's off doing her own thing. I've been told that Sanjay Bhasin is no longer involved with the project. Launch date has been pushed back to early January 2017.

October 4th 2016: Adds details about new entities that use the Noon name.

In 2014, Studio D were commissioned by STC to help them build a digital first telco operator from the ground up to cater to "the Saudi Youth". The new service, Jawwy was launched in May 2016, leading Studio D to share their data from an epic deep dive into Saudi culture.